The Spiritual Revolutionary
Today is the day my teacher passed away, Rav Baruch Shalom HaLevi Ashlag - the Rabash. All of us feed on what we received from him. He was the only man who understoodkl Baal HaSulam and continued his path. He had passed this method down to a few of his disciples, and thanks to him, today we can advance according to Baal HaSulam's method, seeing, hearing, feeling and understanding what he wrote.
The Rabash wrote nearly four hundred articles, one article a week, where he interpreted the entire wisdom of Kabbalah with regard to a person's inner work. Through his articles he enabled us to enter the feeling of the Spiritual World, while doing so methodically, in a simple and logical manner that is close to the person.
In his articles, time and again he quotes from the Bible, the Talmud and additional sources, out of the will to connect between us and the authentic sources, as well as explain to us their Kabbalist authors' way of thinking, who expressed their feelings for us specifically in such a way.
There is no doubt that without the Rabash's articles, we would not be able to find the connection to Baal HaSulam's works. Without his explanations, it is impossible to "open" those books.
I thank the Upper Force for sending me such a teacher, through whom we received Kabbalah. In his life he caused a new level of spiritual breakthrough and revealed to us the method of Kabbalah.
Although Baal HaSulam presented this method in his articles, they remained hidden. The Rabash, however, took his father's articles, who wrote them so that the world would understand them, and thus passed them on to his disciples orally.
The Rabash had begun accepting students freely. That was a first in the history of Kabbalah. A year after I had started studying with him, I conducted a number of lectures at Berg's Kabbalah Center. Those lectures were not meant for the public but instead for lecturers in the institute. After the lectures, the lecturers chose to leave that place because they realized that they do not deal with Kabbalah there, but with business.
I brought them to study with the Rabash along with an additional group of young secular men, forty in total. And the Rabash, who was seventy-seven back then, and lived his whole life in an Orthodox Jewish community in Bnei Brak, with all the prohibitions and limitations it entailed, did not hesitate to accept them as his students!
And indeed they did not plan to become religious - they came to learn Kabbalah from him. And he taught it to secular guys from Tel Aviv! Thus he caused a revolution for real, spanning from our world towards the correction!
It was a completely new phenomenon, a kind that never existed in the entire history of Kabbalah. From then on started the wide dissemination of the wisdom of Kabbalah, as those forty disciples continued his way.
The Rabash was a great revolutionary, and he had a great inner force which enabled him to do it, in spite of all his Hassid's and relatives' view
All that I have in me, I received from him. Our group is named after him - "Bnei Baruch," the sons of Baruch, and thus I believe that we will be fitting spiritual heirs of his.
May he rest in peace within us!
Kabbalah International
